<PT. III> Abortion Rights in America: Outlawing Abortion makes America more "Radical" not more "Conservative"

27) Additional thoughts - On Alcohol, Marijuana & Crime: Also, Kansas might not be such a right-wing place, after-all

This is Part III on a multi-part series on “Abortion Rights” in America

What America witnessed in Kansas last week, should be a wake-up call to the GOP.

 It’s indicative that even “pro-lifers” in Kansas, think that there should be exceptions to the “no abortions” rule. Not all “pro-lifers” feel this way, but enough of them do to indicate that completely outlawing abortions in many areas of the country is not good politics. And I would certainly say it is simply awful policy. 

I get that America has many great divides, one of them being our “secular” society often bumping up against our more “religious” society. In the name of religion, abortion is morally bad.

I find it very interesting however, that people get upset at what they call, the “politicization” of a ten-year old girl who had to travel from Ohio to Indiana to get a safe and legal abortion.

<PT. I> Abortion Rights in America: It's much easier to get pregnant in America than it is to adopt a child

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For people not to see that the outlawing of abortion under any and all circumstances, actually empowers and enables would be “pedophiles” and might even encourage incestuous relationships, are simply blind to the evil in this world. 

How, outlawing abortion (under all circumstances) is innately good, is turning a blind eye to our most vulnerable. 

Trump delivered the “ultimate” moral victory for these voters by getting three conservative judges on the Supreme Court bench, all of whom voted to strike down “Roe v. Wade”.  Fifty years of legal precedent was thrown out the window for this abortion ban.

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As the era of back alley abortions will come back, it actually puts women more at risk, and ultimately has already started to put needless stress on our already vulnerable healthcare system.

This ruling will continue to do more harm than good.  But for your well-to-do families (especially those that are publicly anti-abortion, but secretly still make sure their family has access to them) they will never have a problem, as they have the best health care money can buy.

Heck, wealthy families can even leave the country to have an abortion if needed.  This is even if Republicans fulfill their dream of a nation-wide abortion ban.

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What do Bootleggers and back-alley abortion Doctors, have in common?

When alcohol was made illegal in 1920, there was a tremendous rise of bootleggers in America. People wanted their booze and they would stop at nothing to get it. Now we are running into a similar crisis with women and unwanted pregnancies. 

There is something to be said that we need to go back over one-hundred years in America to find the most fitting comparison between what happens when you outlaw something that is widely accepted and regulated by our government.

To now make women, families and people helping someone get an abortion, “an outlaw”, is cruelly and unjustly punitive. And it’s also creating scenarios where in certain parts of the country, having an abortion is now less safe (for a whole host of reasons).

This not to say that alcohol is actually good for people, far from it. And it’s not to say that abortion is innately good, either.  But, that still doesn’t mean that outlawing it solves any of our problems.

<PT. II> Abortion Rights in America: “Moral issue” voters don't believe in such a thing as an "unwanted pregnancy”

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 People who have studied the history of abortion in America have compelling arguments as to why abortion should be illegal. But, there are more compelling reasons (and not to be indelicate), and more practical reasons why abortion should remain legal.

<Watch the 4 minute clip on “Abortions and Crime: Freakonomics movie" - to better understand how legalized abortions in the 1970s brought down the crime rate in America in the 1990s>

Speaking of crime, and how arbitrary it sometimes is, especially when it comes to marijuana (in the United States and overseas):

When I was a teenager in the mid-to-late-1990s, marijuana was certainly not legal, and it widely used in my high school, and in many ways viewed as largely taboo. Now we are seeing marijuana legalized through large swathes of the country and it actually has been a HUGE BOON for the economy.  

“The legalization and regulation of cannabis for adults has generated billions of dollars in tax revenue, funded important services and programs at the state level and created thousands of jobs across the country,”  - Toi Hutchinson CEO of MPP (Marijuana policy project)

Many people, Libertarians and Green Party members in particular, have made a compelling argument to legalize (or at least decriminalize) all drugs, which would be the best way to win the “War on Drugs”.

There is something to be said for this. The “War on Drugs” created more problems and more criminals, the “War on Women’s Bodies” is going to create more problems and more criminals as well.  

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If you go back just ten years, in 2012 the Romney-Ryan GOP Presidential ticket said that they believed abortion should be outlawed under all circumstances with the exceptions of  1-rape, 2-incest, 3-the life of the woman being endangered.  

That policy ten years ago was quite conservative, but not completely extreme. Yet the stranglehold some on the “Christian Right” have on the Republican party with respect to this issue, creates a boomerang effect, much like you just saw in ruby-red, conservative Kansas. 

It’s a real irony that Kansas became a bell-weather State for views on abortion, as there was a famous book published in 2004 by Thomas Frank called What’s the matter with Kansas? : How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.  Which later was adopted as a movie in 2009.

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The fact that Kansas is front and center in America’s political landscape is nothing short of incredible.

Again, it’s a warning sign to the GOP. But, that’s not to say that even if/when the Democrats accumulate more power, they too won’t overreach the way Republicans most recently have. 

We are controlled by two parties most Americans don’t even like. And, honestly we are busy voting them in and out in such a way that is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Hopefully this abortion ban will be the corrective measure we all need in politics. That’s not to say, I wish we needed that to happen. 

But, we need to operate within the world as it is not to delude ourselves to wish it were something else. That’s the only way we can change America into what we want it to be (or even come close to those ideals).

Peace & Love

-JPJ

Stay tuned for PART IV of “Abortion Rights in America”